Christopher Crawford: Documentary Photography

My Hometown: Fort Wayne, Indiana

Fort Wayne is a city of 250,000 in the northeast corner of Indiana, and the state's second largest city. I was born in Fort Wayne in 1975, and have lived most of my life here.

When I was young, Fort Wayne was a thriving industrial city with a large and prosperous middle class. Men like my father could graduate from high school, as he did in 1968, and immediately begin work in jobs that paid solidly middle class 'family man' wages.

By the time I graduated from high school, that was all gone. The deindustrialization of the United States has hit Indiana's cities hard, and even university graduates here now usually work for pay that is barely above minimum wage. The sad thing is that Fort Wayne has fared better than many other industrial cities in the midwest.

These portfolios represent a number of projects, some still in progress, in which I have documented Fort Wayne and some of the city's more interesting neighborhoods, people, and places.